A detailed examination of Amartya Sen's theory of famines shows that it is logically impossible: it cannot work in the real world. His attempt to apply it to the Bengal Famine of 1943 relies on repeated and consistent misstatements of the evidence in his sources. He relies almost entirely on the...

This report examines the current state of knowledge about green growth in cities and outlines the key research questions and protocols that will guide the OECD Green Cities programme. It builds the case for an urban green growth agenda by examining the economic and environmental conditions that...

There is a large literature on the estimation of frontier production functions, much of it applied to low-income agriculture. However, much of this literature largely ignores nature's role in agricultural production. Because exogenous, natural production conditions (e.g., rainfall, soil quality,...

This paper introduces a method for estimating structural labor supply models in the presence of unobservable wages and deviations of households' marginal revenue product of self-employed labor from their shadow wage. This method is therefore remarkably robust to a wide range of assumptions about...

This paper introduces a method for estimating structural labor supply models in the presence of unobservable wages and deviations of households' marginal revenue product of self-employed labor from their shadow wage. This method is therefore robust to a wide range of assumptions about labor...

Background: Although the food crisis of 2007/2008 was a global one, arid countries, particularly those in the Arab region, were especially hard hit. Many subsequent policy prescriptions for food security emanated from multilateral organizations, NGOs and the countries themselves. While still...

This paper brings together development accounting techniques and the dual economy model to address the role that factor markets have in creating variation in aggregate total factor productivity (TFP). Development accounting research has shown that much of the variation in income across countries...

In this paper, we investigate the link between intra-household resource allocation and familial ties between household members. We show that, within the same geographic, economic and social environments, households where members have "stronger" familial ties (e.g. a nuclear family household)...

Many nonmarket valuation models, such as the Ricardian model, have been estimated using cross sectional methods with a single year of data. Although multiple years of data should increase the robustness of such methods, repeated cross sections suggest the results are not stable. We argue that...

The framework presents how trading in the foreign commodity futures and domestic forward foreign exchange markets can affect the optimal spot positions of domestic commodity producers and traders. It generalizes the models of Kawai and Zilcha (1986) and Kofman and Viaene (1991) to allow both...